In recent months, all of us who follow Tesla have noticed a dramatic increase in what Elon Muskcharacterized as "relentlessly negative" news, rumors, and innuendo concerning Tesla and its vehicle lineup. You'll find damaging Tesla stories and commentary on obscure blogs and twitter feeds, across mainstream news sites and aggregators, and in national web sources and publications.

A few years ago Tesla and Elon were the darlings of the media—eco-friendly, tech-savvy, hyper-innovative—the wave of the future. Now, if you were to believe the conventional wisdom as reported by the media, things have changed. Sure, there are still staunch defenders of the company, but the tsunami of news presented with a distinctly negative spin often drowns them out.

The big question is why, and the answers I've seen are a little naïve and often overly-simplistic.

Defenders of the company—and there are many—blame "the shorts" (investors who bet large sums on shorting TSLA in the hope that stock prices will fall) or "big oil" or "big auto", recognizing that Tesla's success represents a significant long-term threat to all of those constituencies.